


A Gentler Rewind

by Petronia



Series: Hannibal stories [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail plays the piano, Drug Use, Gen, Season/Series 02, time is fake in Hannibal the TV series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-26 10:07:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petronia/pseuds/Petronia
Summary: Her new father promised her beginner’s exercises.I’ll bring them next time,he said, with a smile, when she remarked on the piano. She didn’t ask if she could — should — play, but the expectation was unspoken. This is part of what she needs to learn.





	A Gentler Rewind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damnslippyplanet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Gentler Ending](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7627843) by [damnslippyplanet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet). 



The girl sits at the piano.

It’s a real concert grand, not like the battered upright in her high school music room. The dark wood gleams; there’s no dust as of yet. She’s not sure what she’ll be expected to do about that inevitability. The seat is already adjusted to her height.

She flips through the music, looking for something easy. A slow tempo, with sparse notes and white space on the page.

None of it looks easy.

Her new father promised her beginner’s exercises. _I’ll bring them next time,_ he said, with a smile, when she remarked on the piano. She didn’t ask if she could — should — play, but the expectation was unspoken. This is part of what she needs to learn.

Defeated, she flips the score back to the beginning and starts there.

 

***

 

The girl spent time in hospital, before this place. It felt expensive and well-meaning — calm colours and greenery and unobtrusive glass, like a zoo enclosure designed with animal welfare in mind. Not a prison, she was told, but a waystation. Her life on pause.

She didn’t believe them. There was no onward destination, unless she made one.

Now, here...

She can go outside as much as she wants. There are no other houses within line of sight, and no passing traffic. No trails or fences either, whether along the cliff or through the woods, but she’s an experienced hiker and isn’t deterred. She even discovered a steep footpath that winds down the cliff, at the very edge of the landscaped grounds, to a narrow strip of pebble beach. There’s a weather-worn, wooden pier down there, though she suspects it hasn’t seen use for a long time.

She wonders if there’s a boat in the garden shed. The shed door is locked, firewood piled neatly outside.

Of course, she could walk back down the road they came by. She slept most of the way here (he gave her _something so it doesn’t hurt_ ), but reason says she’s still on the East Coast. The road will eventually meet a one-lane highway, truck stops, a town. An entire world where Abigail Hobbs is dead.

Abigail Hobbs is free, as only the dead can be.

What good would a boat do?

 

***

 

Her new father comes back, bearing gifts. Refilled medication, clothing catalogues, a picnic hamper, books — and the promised piano exercises. He guides her through the first five in the collection, sitting by her side on the piano bench.

“Thirty minutes every morning, before you experiment with other pieces,” he tells her. “It will take you less time, eventually, but the muscles and tendons must be warmed. It’s easy for an older beginner to overextend.”

His eyes are as kind as ever, his hands steady and knowing as he prepped a syringe. Earlier he checked the side of her head and pronounced that it was _healing well_. She changes the dressing but never looks.

“It’s a lovely day,” he says. “Shall we eat outside?”

 

***

 

The books are about history and art, for the most part. Some are heavy-weight coffee table affairs, full of glossy prints of frescos and sculpture: contorted marbles, saints draped in gold and lapis lazuli, bleeding rubies from their wounds. The male figures are dark-curled and gracile, familiar. The women are high-breasted, blond and pallid, and the girl doesn’t recognize herself in them.

In the evening, with darkness pressing around and against the glass of the house, she takes her pills as directed and retreats to her bedroom. There she looks at the images until they unfold around and enclose her, dimensions laddering upward and outward like an intricate cardboard cut-out. She is standing in a chapel, shadowy-gold, and Will Graham is with her; in the flickering candlelight the saints seem to shift and murmur, watching them from above.

“Even in an enlightened world, we come here to feel closer to God,” says Will.

“Do you feel closer to God?” the girl asks him. She thinks she means to say, _do you believe in God?_   _After what He’s done to us?_

“God’s not whom I came here to find,” says Will. “God can’t save any of us because it’s inelegant. Elegance is more important than suffering. That’s his design.”

There are others in the chapel: figures muffled and hunched in prayer, old black-clad women telling their beads. The priest stands still as a statue between the pews, his gaze somehow reproachful, as if he’s overheard. The girl averts her eyes.

“Are you talking about God or Hannibal?” she says.

“Hannibal’s not God,” says Will. “Wouldn’t have any fun, being God. Defying God, now that’s his idea of a good time.”

“Then he’ll save us,” the girl says. “He’ll make a place for us, if God won’t.”

 

***

 

There are tracks, in the first dusting of snow of the season. The girl follows the spoor as she’s been taught, but is the one startled into freeze when the deer lifts its head.

It’s a female, a young whitetail doe. Its black eyes are liquid and calm and swallow the girl up. She remembers the texture of the deer pelt: the haptic phantom of it, rough-soft luxury at her fingertips. Fingers running through long hair. White and russet parting under a blade.

She doesn’t move; doesn’t breathe.

Doesn’t go back to the woods, after that.

 

***

 

“So why not go further?” says Marissa. They’re lying side by side on the bed, feet dangling off the edge. “You can just keep… rewinding. The cup’ll never break if you don’t buy it. Or if you stop it from being made. Actually, you could stop anyone from inventing the tea cup.”

“I could stop tea from being discovered,” the girl says. The ceiling is white and high and pleasant, and there is a smell of fresh flowers in the air.

“Change the course of plant evolution. Anything else? How about dinosaurs?” A frown creeps into Marissa’s voice. “Do dinosaurs come before or after plant evolution?”

“Neither,” the girl says (or maybe it isn’t her; she is awake and not awake, herself and not herself. Maybe it’s someone else in the room, beyond the white and pleasant light). “They’re part of the same time, which is every time. William Blake wrote: _hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour_ … It is the time of possibilities, imagined futures impinging on the past, such that their implications are made real. Every mystical tradition names the concept. Physics is recalcitrant, but perhaps some day, those equations, too, will be unravelled.”

“And then the tea cup comes together,” says Marissa.

“Just so. Just as you prayed it would.”

“What if no one dies?” says Marissa. “What if we leave together?”

But the smell of flowers is stronger, now, more metallic, like blood.

“Is that what you would like?”

“I would,” the girl whispers. A forest of antlers is growing, in the periphery of her vision, and Marissa is gone. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault, I know it now, I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need for apologies, Abigail,” her father says. “You have only and ever done what was necessary. In that, you followed your nature perfectly.”

 

***

 

“What if we all left together,” says Will. “Like we were supposed to. Where would we have gone?”

They’re back in the chapel, sitting side by side beneath the altar. The girl looks up at the ceiling of filagree gold and thinks, _I’m dreaming of Eternity_. Thinks: _are you coming with us too?_

“In some other world?” she says.

“In some other world.”

“He said he made a place for us.”

Will is silent for a long time, before meeting her eyes.

“I made a place for you, Abigail,” he says, gently. “In this world only... But a teacup that shatters never comes back together.”

In the ceiling, a crack appears.

 

***

 

After her warm-up exercises, the girl settles on Bach’s _Goldberg Variations_. She plays slowly and badly enough that she’s barely able to reconstruct the bones of a song from its printed score, but the Aria merely stretches out, impervious to mangling, like languid strands of putty.

Time seems to part these days, for her: as if redoing were as easy as stepping backward instead of forward, on a swept-clean floor, in an empty house.

Each note echoes and decays and begins again. Bach’s melody changes, and doesn’t change. It recapitulates itself, a gentler ending.

  



End file.
